Prompt: Liam and Break; wild violet and pomegranate; "Let's make beautiful messes together."
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Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki
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It was no secret Xerxes Break liked sweets, so it came as no surprise when Reim discovered the cake was missing; what did surprise him, however, was the sour look on Break's face as he glared at a partially eaten slice. Pulling up a chair, Reim sat next to his longtime friend in the midst of the Reinsworth gardens. Carefully observing the situation so as to not jump in and get his head bitten off unjustly, he took a silent moment to breathe in the invigorating aroma of mixed wildflowers: roses, chrysanthemums, marigolds, and violets.
Shifting his attention to the cake, Reim asked, "Was it not to your liking?"
"No."
Well. He couldn't have sounded more displeased if he had tried. "What's wrong with it?"
"It crunched," Break muttered, his unhappy gaze poisoning the cake with as much venom as Reim would have expected to be directed toward a certain Vincent Nightray. "And I don't mean stale; I mean crunched."
Reim blinked several times before he realized Break wasn't joking. However, by then he had discovered it was quite impossible to hold back his rising laughter. Seeing Break's face change from confusion to annoyance only egged him on; Reim laughed until the tears slid down his face and breathing became a chore.
"What?" Break asked impatiently when Reim finally managed to quiet himself down to sporadic fits of small giggles.
Reim wiped his eyes on the back of his sleeve and replaced his glasses, still unable to keep the smile entirely from his lips. "That's a pomegranate cake, Xerxes. Of course it crunched."
An instant was all it took for the rest of the unusual dessert to meet Reim's face. Xerxes held the upended plate in place for a deliberately extended moment before deciding he would much rather leave the gardens than face whatever else Reim had to say.
"Reim, you maddening idiot," he muttered under his breath as he disappeared through a dense shower of climbing ivy. "Only you would create a recipe like that."
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Reim stopped dead in his tracks, stunned into silence. There was a man in a tattered black cloak lying at the foot of the Reinsworth gate, strewn as carelessly as a child's forgotten doll. His shocked face and white hair were covered in blood, his skin pale as death, and his eye...his left eye...
Oh, gracious, that eye was gone.
Reim felt a surge of nausea. Miss Sharon cried for help.
His memories were a little hazy: he remembered the flurry of people rushing in and out, the tension, the high level of alert. The swarms of Reinsworth-allied agents from Pandora, mostly inspecting the gate; their contracted Chains; and even his master, Rufus Barma. The room stank with undercurrents of a cold, metallic scent that only came from the Abyss, but it had mixed with the putrid stench of blood and sweat. Reim distinctly remembered Lady Shelly's perfume as she swept by, urgently taking into her care the wounded man: A scent of wild violets. A scent of beauty and normalcy he had clung to for comfort in the whirlwind of unfamiliar activity.
Lady Cheryl, ever aware, decided it was time enough to usher the children off to their rooms. Apparently, she didn't want them to see how much blood there really was, pooled beneath the stranger's dark cape, saturating the once-white floor. The man had begun to groan and mutter incoherently; his agonized, semi-conscious sounds chilling the blood in Reim's veins.
Lady Cheryl led the way, sweeping past the clamor and confusion with an air of absolute authority. "Let the children out," she demanded, voice strong and clear. Reim didn't remember what she said to him specifically after that point; he had been too focused on the scene behind him. The strange man, his head cradled in Lady Shelly's lap as crimson blood flowed over his face and soaked into her favorite satin dress, had looked directly at him.
The man's eye was red. The color of ripe pomegranates. The color of those marked by misfortune. The color of those forbidden Children of—
The broken, bloodied man frightened him, but Reim was unable to tear his eyes away. There was something about the stranger that was foreign, something incredibly dangerous, yet there was also something...beautiful beneath the exterior of pain and misery. At that point, however, Reim found himself pushed out the door. He stumbled, but held onto Miss Sharon tightly. He told her it would be alright, the grown-ups would fix it, everything would go back to normal soon.
But even to his own ears, the words sounded like lies, and he could think of nothing more than the color red.
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It was absolutely impossible to get any work done when Xerxes was around, and this day was proving to be no different. Between the spilled coffee; the strewn reports, some of which had pages still floating in the air; and the constant littering of empty candy wrappers, he made a mess a temperamental toddler would be envious of.
"Oh, don't get angry now, Reim," Break laughed. "It'll make your face look permanently boring."
Unable to withstand Break's verbal, psychological, and physical abuses any longer, Reim promptly threw his empty teacup at Break's head. Unfortunately, Break had anticipated the move; all that remained in his newly vacated chair was a shattering rain of painted violets on fine ceramic shards.
"What a mess," Break sang, not bothering to hide the amusement from his voice.
Reim, armed and ready with another potential ceramic missile, attempted to take aim. However, Break once again anticipated his intentions, shoving an unwrapped sweet into Reim's shouting mouth before he even registered where Break had gone.
The taste was unexpected. Bitter, yet sweet; tangy and rich.
"Pomegranate," Break clarified as his flapping hand motioned for Reim's arm to lower the upraised teacup.
Reim sighed in defeat and allowed himself to be led to his office chair. Xerxes patted Reim's head and deliberately placed a still-wrapped candy on the desk. However, when Reim so much as glanced at it, Break seized the opportunity to vanish, leaving him alone with a chaos-strewn office to clean...
"XERXES BREAK, YOU INSUFFERABLE IDIOT!"
But Break was already too far away for Reim to hear the responding laughter.
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If his master was a pomegranate flower, Xerxes Break was the fruit.
Reim scowled in annoyance as he stormed away from an office containing a white-haired, laughing maniac who just so happened to have the distinction of being his former friend.
"Why do I have to listen to you, Xerxes Break?" he questioned the air in exasperation. "Why do you have to be such a moron?"
"Oh, Reim, you're so harsh!" Break laughed as he appeared from a closet to Reim's immediate left. Startled, (didn't he just leave him behind in the office? Why did this man do strange things like this?) Reim let out a gasp and toppled over his feet in his haste to back away from the enthusiastically swinging closet doors.
"Xerxes Break," he growled from the floor as he straightened his glasses and began gathering his scattered notes. "You are a moron. Don't deny it."
Break looked thoughtful for a moment, tapping his chin with a finger before turning his head to consult the horrifying little blue doll on his shoulder. "He thinks I'm a moron, Emily!" Break said in mock surprise.
The doll cackled in response, "But he made that mess! It's stretching all across the hallway!"
Break smiled in agreement and leaned down to offer Reim a hand. It was reluctantly taken, but Break effortlessly hoisted the younger man to his feet nonetheless. "Are you angry because I laughed at your little floriography book?"
"It's none of your business," Reim snapped before sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose in an effort to avoid an oncoming headache. Break wouldn't let this pass; he loved sticking his nose where it didn't belong.
"Master Rufus has been receiving flower arrangements from Lady Cheryl," Reim reluctantly continued. "He sees them, gets angry, and never says why. It turns out she's been sending him floral messages, but they're not nice; they're always meant to embarrass him in some way or another. Yesterday, she sent him a bowl of pomegranates atop their own blossoms. The flower, of course, suggests mature elegance, and the fruit...the fruit..."
"Yes?" Break prompted.
"...conceit and foolishness."
Break grinned, impossibly wide. "Sounds just like him! I must congratulate Milady when next I see her; she was spot-on, as usual."
Reim scowled and brushed past the madly laughing Hatter. He continued on his way down the remainder of the hall, turned sharply into his own office, and slammed the door behind him.
Amused, Break watched until Reim disappeared. Turning on his heel, he departed in the opposite direction with a knowing smile tugging at the corners of his mouth while his fingers tugged at the corners of a candy wrapper.
You, my dear Reim, Xerxes thought to himself, are obviously the violet. Faithful, pure, and modest.
And with that thought, he disappeared into the darkened hallway with naught but an empty piece of colored cellophane on the floor to show he had ever been there at all.
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Sighing and muttering under his breath about the utter ridiculousness of his superiors and the inherent inability for any one of them to be even the least bit responsible whatsoever, Reim found himself at a sudden halt in the upper hallway. It appeared there was a conundrum placed directly (conveniently) before him; one that only served to annoy his already irritable self further.
He had finally reached the meeting room on level four, but the doors were (uncharacteristically, for this dusty, forgotten hole-in-the-wall) closed, and that, further serving to complicate his situation, his arms were too full of papers for him to merely set them aside and properly grasp the doorhandles. The papers would inherently topple to the ground if he did so, and then there would be a fantastic mess to clean, and it would take Reim hours to chase the last pieces as they sailed out the window or went wherever they did, and he would be left with a sore back for the rest of the week; let's not forget to mention he'd also be late for serving his master tea.
Reim could only sigh again as his glasses slipped down his nose. How very typical.
Glancing around for the smallest sign of a living soul inhabiting the vicinity, Reim was unsurprised to find he was quite alone (all the sane people were downstairs where things actually happened and they could therefore be useful to this organization). He was, however, rather amazed to discover that the left-hand door was slightly ajar! After closing his eyes in a brief moment of thankful relief, Reim set about the task of working at the door with his foot, trying his best not to lose hold of the papers while simultaneously tipping back his head so he could see through his angled lenses.
Once inside (the way was not easy, with the door constantly falling back and hitting Reim, or his stack of papers, or Reim), he was flummoxed to discover he was not alone in this most obscure corner of the world Pandora owned. In fact, he not only found himself with company, but he instantly recognized the back of a snowy-white head he had seen a million times before (mostly bounding away from him with great speed obtained from who-knew-where, accompanied by the most grating sort of gleeful laughter Reim had ever heard in his life), although it usually wasn't sporting a short, scruffy ponytail.
"Xerxes Break," Reim huffed, eyes narrowed in annoyance as he set the heavy stack of papers on the meeting table with a loud thump. "It wouldn't have killed you to have helped me with the door."
"I see you got in rather fine on your own," came the cheerful reply, but the man named Break failed to turn around and address Reim properly. Reim scowled in response as he pushed up his glasses, strode forward, and opened his mouth to begin lecturing his colleague on the necessities of basic mannerisms common to all who worked in Pandora, regardless of rank or—
What in the world?
Reim was momentarily unable to speak; he just stared, dumbfounded. Although Break was known to do crazy things, this...this was just strange.
Break, lazily holding a paintbrush in his right hand, held a small artist's palette in his left, complete with smeared samples of color. He was wearing splotches of aforementioned paint upon his black slacks and rolled-up sleeves, and was occupying himself by absently dragging long, thick strokes upon a messy, convoluted canvas as his one remaining eye refused to focus on the project before him.
Neither painter nor bystander said anything for a long moment. Break continued to run through his previous scribbles with deliberately drawn-out strokes of his brush, and Reim watched in silence.
Finally, Reim spoke. "Xerxes," he said quietly, gently. "What are you doing?"
"Painting," came the obvious reply.
Reim frowned. "What are you painting?"
"Nothing."
"Why?"
"Because that's what life is, Reim," Xerxes sighed, "a whole lot of nothing wrapped up in pretty colors."
Reim watched Xerxes for a moment, noting the distant look in his blind eye, the stray wisps of hair that fell in front of his tired face, and the way he moved as if the world's greatest burden was heavier yet upon his aging-but-not shoulders. With a sigh, Reim brought up a chair and rolled his sleeves, taking the brush from Break's hand.
"You're rather depressing this morning," Reim said as he scrubbed at the paint-saturated brush in a nearby pail of water.
Xerxes laughed; Reim smiled.
"Well then," Break said, switching over to his characteristically annoying sing-song voice, "if I'm so dreary, then I guess that means we switched personalities~?"
Reim promptly threw the wet brush at Break, who predictably dodged the projectile and continued laughing even as Reim huffed and crossed his arms. Why was he such a fool to insist on trying to cheer up a clown when the joke was always played on him?
"Oh, cheer up, you," Xerxes said. Reim noticed the mischievous twinkle had reappeared in the other man's eye as he laughed. He looked more animated; more alive. More like himself.
Xerxes rummaged through a small duffel bag at his feet and produced two more brushes. Sweeping the old canvas onto the floor (Reim winced as he watched it land paint-side down and knew it was not, in fact, covered with dry paint), Break replaced it with a new one. He handed Reim a brush and set the palette between them.
"Here," Break said. "Let's draw life."
Reim nodded and dabbed his brush in a vivid red that reminded him of the color of pomegranates seeds. Xerxes, on the other hand, chose for himself a deep purple, a hue reminiscent of wild violets. Reim glanced at him, but Break smiled in his enigmatic fashion and began to outline that very flower, leaving Reim to wonder how the man had known which color he had chosen—he was blind—but apparently that had yet to stop Xerxes Break from doing anything.
With a shrug, Reim began to sketch patterns of red on the canvas, crossing deliberately into Xerxes' lines (to annoy him), and immediately squawked when it worked and Break calmly flicked his paint-laden brush at Reim. Several small droplets flew off the bristles and splattered his pristine uniform. Before he could sputter out a retort, however, Break placed a gentle finger on his lips and moved Reim's brush back to the canvas. With a huff, Reim did as instructed, and together they began, once more, to paint.
Together, they smeared splotches of dripping color and water on the floor, on the canvas, on themselves, and on each other. Together, they depicted their intertwined version of life: crimson red and deep violet; intertwining the realities of pain and healing trust. Together, they made a beautiful mess.